


through your hallowed eyelids

by magisterequitum



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-09
Updated: 2013-02-09
Packaged: 2017-11-28 17:35:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/677050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magisterequitum/pseuds/magisterequitum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>as punishment klaus kills everyone and makes her live. he never said how she had to live though and it's been years since she's seen a familiar face. / set post 3.22</p><p>(warning for many character deaths and horror/slight gore.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	through your hallowed eyelids

It's eleven years till she sees a familiar face.

It's so strange that she stops in the middle of the street she's in, full on stops, knees locking together as a woman bumps into her back before grumbling and walking around, a curse spit out at her, but she doesn't move. It's like seeing a ghost, or whatever that phrase actually meant; only she knows about ghosts, real ghosts, more than any paperback novel could hope to tell. She wonders if she's seeing something, a mirage, a vision, wonders if vampires can suffer from psychotic breaks like that; the answer is yes. Everyone else is dead.

But then she remembers he was never in Mystic Falls when Klaus, when his brother, had killed everyone and left their bodies for her as punishment.

Elena still hasn't moved. She watches. Her mind runs with questions: why are you here? what are you doing? have you come for me? has Klaus changed his mind? am I to die now? are you going to kill me? will you kill me?

There's blood on her wrist, just under the place where the sleeve of her sweater doesn't quite meet her hand. The skin there is sticky, tacky from the dinner she'd just swiped from the alley beside the florist that has the sunflowers she likes.

He's not moving either. He's faster than her, older, stronger, quicker.

She turns anyway, gives him her back because if he's not going to say anything, then fine, and she's stalked by enough demons without having another one added to her collection. Amazing all of the senses that she has now. She's learned how to use them over the years, honed them into assets and weapons, more so than a regular vampire even could think of.

As it is, she feels him behind her, hears the whisper of his clothing settle back into place as the displaced air from his quick movement whisks over the material, the heavy weight of him a solid presence, so much so that he might as well have touched her.

Elena never gives him the chance. Her hand grabs the dagger she never goes anywhere without, pulls its place at her waist, underneath her sweater, and turns.

"El-ay-" Her name isn't finished and she stabs, twisting and pulling it up.

Elijah's face wears the same expression from the last time she'd daggered him, eleven years ago. She holds his gaze till his eyes go dim.

 

 

 

Klaus kills everyone.

Elena wakes with a scream stuck in her throat on a cold metal slab in the Mystic Falls Hospital morgue. There's still water in her mouth from drowning. Her clothes are drenched too, jeans uncomfortably stuck to her thighs and calves, weighed down. These are the things she remembers. Just like she remembers the two sets of eyes that had been waiting for her, one mossy green and the other ice blue.

She screams for real two weeks later when Klaus gives her Stefan and Damon's hearts in a box on her front porch.

He kills them all, lays them out like presents under a tree for her to find. Caroline next, her blonde curls matted with blood, fingernails jagged and fingers broken, evidence that she'd fought back. Jeremy with his neck snapped, the ring to the right where his hand sat, unconnected to the bloody stump of his wrist. The Salvatore brothers. Matt, eyes wide open, a bloody grimace on his face. He kills her neighbor's daughter too, twelve year old Kimmy who she'd once babysat for her first job. Bonnie is last; they hide after the others are killed, do their best to stay alive, but he gets her too, and her bestfriend dies with a snarl on her face and magic crackling under her skin.

Elena's never been the doppleganger with the flight instinct. That had been Katherine, to run and hide and survive by disappearing. Elena always had stood and fought. She's never run, and Klaus doesn't give her the choice either.

His fingers feel like steel around her as he forces her to look at him. The strength in his bones makes her jaw click, so hard does he hold her, so hard too that the toes of her shoes scrape against the dirt as she's pulled up to his height.

She waits for death that never comes.

"Now what?" she asks, spitting in his face through clenched teeth. "Who will you show me off to? You killed all of them." She deserves credit for the fact that her voice doesn't crack.

Klaus laughs, a delighted smile curving at the corners of his mouth. "No one, love." He releases her back to the ground, pushing her just slightly so she stumbles back. "Now you live."

 

 

 

She shouldn't be surprised when the hairs on the back of her back rise as she enters her home. Leaving Elijah in the alleyway near the street, after taking his weight when he'd slumped forward on her from the dagger's magic, had been an instinctual move. Eleven years watching her back had turned her into a paranoid wreck. Thus, she's not surprised that a part of her sixth sense kicks in as she closes the backdoor.

Elijah sits at the little kitchen table. It's like the night he'd invaded her bedroom all over again, his spread legs and shoulders make him bigger and out of place from everything else around him. There's a blood stain on his button-down. It still looks a little wet in the center, a tan slice of skin peaking out.

Elena sits the freshly cut flowers from the hill behind the cottage down beside the sink. Her eyes track from the dagger's wound to his hand where the dagger actually is, watching the way his fingers curve over the hilt while he taps the point against the table.

She doesn't question how he found her again or who drew the dagger from him, probably a drunk in the town passing by. He speaks first anyway.

"A curious thing, your possession of this." He raises an indulgent eyebrow to her. "Since the only known existing daggers are in my family's hands."

Elena tilts her head, lips compressed tightly, refusing to speak. She matches his expression with her own arched eyebrow.

His lips curve even more at the edges. A lesser person would be frightened, suitably chastised in the presence of the oldest being around who could snap every bone in her hand with very little pressure or need for movement. As it is, she's all used up in the fear department.

"Elena," he drags her name out as he taps the dagger on the table with a particularly hard thud. "How did you come by this?"

Her teeth grind and the muscles in her face contort, but her voice is flat. "Bonnie made it for me. Before your brother ripped her throat out."

There's open shock on his face. It's not easy to tell, but there for someone who knows how to find it, knows what to look for, knows how he works as intimately as she does, it's not hard at all. The corners of his eyes crease, a slackness to his mouth, a pulse of his eyes as they widen.

"Oh," she exhales, and the sound is something cruel, an exhale that drips with disdain and mockery.

Elena laughs then and leaves him in the kitchen.

 

 

 

She tries to kill herself once.

Somewhere around eight months after she turns and buries the bodies of all of her loved ones, after she leaves Mystic Falls to never step foot there again, the swarm of emotions gets to be too much. She understands now how horrible it was to be this thing, to be so enhanced in every facet of what it meant to be human. Every bit of anger and sadness and everything in between had burrowed itself beneath her skin so deep she couldn't claw them out. It was horrific to be so much and to be nothing all day.

Klaus had told her she couldn't stake herself, couldn't take her ring off, but he had never compelled her on anything else.

Starving herself is a loophole she aims for. It's also the loophole that lets her know that while Klaus might not be around, he certainly hadn't left her unwatched.

"This was not part of the deal," he says, gripping tight to her hair that hasn't been washed in days and holds her head over the ruined neck of her apartment neighbor. "You're to live in despair for your actions."

Elena's weak, but still she struggles.

"Your punishment's not so easy, sweetheart." He shoves her face into the bloody gash. "Drink."

His command is unnecessary as the iron tang infiltrates her nostrils. Basic instincts of survival kick in, and then she's gulping down the blood of the woman who'd once held the door open for her when she'd moved in.

Klaus kills the rest of the building. Snaps their necks and leaves them for her to find.

She doesn't try a repeat of that.

Not that particularly.

 

 

 

Elijah's gone when she comes back downstairs. Part of her's disappointed he didn't follow her upstairs, that he didn't wrap his hands around her neck for her impudence, didn't reach behind her rib cage for what's been broken for so long and do her the favor of ripping it out. She waits for him. Stares out the window towards the little creek behind the hill and counts the ripples of the pampas grass she can see.

The dagger's in its same spot on the table.

 

 

 

Since Klaus had attached a hybrid to watch her, Elena’s gotten quite good at noticing people watching her. Eleven years has trained her to see everything around her even if she doesn’t react to it.

As it is, Elijah doesn't make it all that hard for her to spot him. He's always hovering from her peripheral. He's there as she goes into town to feed, when she browses the bins at the used bookstore, as she buys an orange lamp from the antique store. He says nothing. He doesn't approach her. He just watches.

When he follows her home again, she confronts him.

"Are you replacing my hybrid bodyguard? Here to make sure I’m living and suffering?”

Elijah tilts his head and blinks at her. “Who?”

Crossing her arms across her chest, she narrows her gaze at him. The door’s at her back, and while it won’t stop him certainly, it’s a reassurance regardless. “I think his name is Greg. The one your brother has always watching me?”

A humming noise erupts from the back of his throat and a smirk cuts his stoic face in half. “Ah, no. Greg, did you say his name was? He’s dead.”

The muscles of her face loosen until her mouth parts slightly. Her tongue suddenly feels too thick for her mouth. There’s a thought in the back of her head that starts to take root, but she’s not played this game with him so long that she’s afraid she’s lost the means to decipher his words and gestures. She’s stunned, the only emotion that she’s able to pinpoint.

“I have to go,” Elena says instead. “You can’t be here.”

The door closes with a loud snick to her ears. Thankfully, he doesn’t follow.

 

 

 

She’s cutting sunflowers again.

Those inside on the counter from days ago had died. She’d forgotten to put them in water, and only when the sickly sweet smell of decay had hit her nose had she remembered them. They’d gone to the trash and now she held scissors in her hand.

She cuts them the same way her mother had once cut from the rose bushes her dad had planted for her on their tenth anniversary: at a downward angle to help them suck up water.

“You killed him didn’t you?”

He’s a solid presence at her back where he stands a few feet away. The grass whisks against the fabric of his pants just as it leaves green stains against her bare skin beneath her shorts.

“Yes.”

She snips another and then cuts the end. It’s taller than the others. The scissors hover in the air, and she stares at the ground as she asks, “Are you here to kill me too?”

A low laugh and almost fondness in his voice when he responds and says, “You know the answer to that.”

 

 

 

Elena doesn’t leave the cottage. She stays inside and wonders if this is Klaus’s final punishment, if he’s gotten so angry at her that he’s ready to kill her, if he’s sent Elijah to do so because he’s the last possible person she could claim to know in a positive light, if so many things.

“Elena,” he calls.

She blinks and realizes that she’s been sitting at the table for hours, the sun dipping below horizon outside, that she hadn’t heard him come in at all. She turns her head to look up at him, her eyes focusing on the frown on his face. “If you’re not here to kill me,” she says slowly, licking her dry lips and watching as his frown deepens. “Then why are you here?”

“I’m not here for you, Elena. Not in that way. I’m here for Klaus.”

It’s her turn to frown. “I don’t understand.”

Elijah exhales from his nose, an impatient gesture coupled with the twist of his mouth. “I’m not here to kill you. I’m here for you.”

Sometimes clicks in her mind. She shakes her head, confused.

“I found you. I’ve followed you. I got rid of that hybrid for a reason.”

“You can’t kill Klaus,” she blurts out despite the intent she sees on his face that speaks otherwise.

He smiles at her, a deprecating quirk of his lips. “Nature is,” he looks down and removes his hand from his suit pocket, touching his thumb to his ring finger before returning to her attention. “Most displeased. My brother has grown only more paranoid and his actions have grown to be too much.”

Her brain feels foggy and she struggles to grasp at the whole picture. “He took your family didn’t he? The rest of you all?”

His eyes go hard and flinty, and suddenly he’s as terrifying as he’s ever been, only she’s not afraid for herself. “Just as he took yours.”

The fog lifts and all of those emotions she’d buried down inside her rise to the surface all at once.

 

 

Her fangs drop and she’s out of the chair and at him before she can blink or form the thought, her muscles obeying the rage that rises inside of her. She wraps one hand around his neck and the other flat to his chest, pushing backwards. Part of her realizes this is him allowing her to move him as she pleases, part of her doesn’t care. She’s locked it all away over the years, shut down at the command that she had to live but Klaus had never said she had to do it the way he wanted. It hurts, all of it, and she’s angry he’s even here now.

“This is your fault,” she breathes out into his face as his back hits the refrigerator.

Elijah’s stare is impassive, dark eyes unwavering from her face. His throat twitches under her hand.

She bites his mouth, draws first blood and swallows it down all while pressing closer to him. She’s tired of him watching, tired of him hovering around her, the thoughts of the days and weeks he’s been following her guiding her movements.

“You owe me this,” Elena says to him, her lips bruised and slick with his blood. “You owe me.”

Her back’s against the opposite wall faster than she can blink, and she’s lifting a leg as he reaches for it, jumping to meet him while she claws at his shoulders and shreds through layers of fine cloth. She’s pinned by his hips, unrelenting in their strength, which is fine. It leaves her room to arch her back with her head against the wall to give him access to getting at her shirt and pants in the way. And then she’s biting at his mouth again, the slope of his jaw, his neck, her curving to bring him into her. Naked skin and his hands on her waist, they fuck against the wall of her kitchen. She’s sure that part of the cabinet cracks under her wayward fingers. Her eyes take in the shelves behind them, the little objects she’d somehow tried to keep as a reminder of her humanity she’d discarded. A tiny laugh escapes from her mouth, changing to a moan as sharp fangs pierced the skin below her clavicle.

She’s not certain how long they stay there against the wall.

 

 

Elena is certain that afterwards she’s still against the wall and both of their mouths are stained red. It’s fitting she thinks, and her lips pull up as if by strings without her will. “Hello.”

There’s work to be done. Anger still thrums beneath her skin and she feels emboldened. On the table the dagger lays beside the vase of sunflowers.


End file.
